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Bad Bedfellows

Norm Hudson

    like a good laugh. It motivates me. It even made me pursue my chosen career. And hers was good all right. You could hear it reverberating round the poolside.
    I guess I did look funny. My legs and bottom up in the air. My head in the hotel flowerbed, Unable to extricate myself from the upended sunbed.
    It was the wrong hotel. I’d known that from the first day when I’d gone down to the pool. Now I’m not really a pool person. I prefer the sea. You’re either one or the other, aren’t you? But the beach was out of bounds. Blasted by wild winds and the crashing waves of the Atlantic. Even at night you could hear it complaining.
    The hotel pool area was sheltered. Sunny. Hot.
    And small.
    It looked like the hotel’s owners had attempted to place a sunbed for the entire population of the island around the pool. There was more space between the megaliths of Malta than there was between the sunbeds sardined around the pool edge. Undaunted that first day, I’d taken small steps towards the only bed I’d seen that did not have a towel on it. I tried to slide my leg between the edge of the sunbed and the one rammed ��
    up against it, occupied by a slumbering seal-like body with no interest or regard for my predicament. One bruised lower leg afterwards, I moved to the other side of the sunbed and repeated the procedure, the other participant of the next bed totally oblivious.
    I could see it was a friendly hotel.
    Now I’ve always been clumsy. It got me a lot of laughs as a child. Some kind. Some cruel. I determined the only way to get on to the sunbed was to crash down on it from the front so I turned round, back to the bed and threw myself, bottom down, on it.
    That’s how I ended up in among the flowers.
    “You all right?”
    The lifeguard extended his arm towards me and pulled me and the sunbed up amid the woman way opposite’s wild howls of laughter. Her arm was extended too. Towards me.
    Her companion raised his beefy body from the sunbed, gave a fleeting glance in the direction of her arm and returned to his sunbathing ritual, as if his wife’s outbursts were something he’d long got accustomed to and no longer interested him.
    It didn’t seem to interest anyone else around the pool edge either.
    As the lifeguard walked away, I stood with my back to the sunbed, directly facing the woman opposite. She wasn’t fazed. She stared rudely back. I wasn’t open to confrontation. I was there for a holiday so I sat down gingerly on the bottom of the sunbed, slid myself carefully backwards and slowly lowered my head on to the bed.
    It wasn’t a pleasant place to be. Sandwiched between a snoring seal and the oblivious one, who’d now surfaced from his slumber, spraying his body with mosquito spray, the entire contents of which missed him and landed on me.
    I retreated to the cool interior of the hotel after less than half an hour, aware the surface of my sunbed had already been covered with a towel.
    “You need to get down really early in the morning to put your towel down,” said the receptionist, a smug smirk on his face, as if he enjoyed the stupid questions posed to him by the sub-human species he was forced to serve.
    I obliged him.
    “How early?” I said.
    “Before 7a.m.,” he said, smiling, knowing full well what a goddamn awful time that was when you’re on holiday. “You’ve had it, if you don’t,” he added, more than gleefully, gauging whether I’d have some smart answer to the problem he’d posed but evidently presuming I hadn’t when he went on, “Every bed will be covered with a towel the whole day.”
    The wind abated the next day and the Atlantic had appeased itself so I headed for the beach. The sunbeds were in twos set spaciously apart. A salve for the soul. I knew there was little chance anyone would settle themselves on the adjacent sunbed.
    The beach was relatively deserted so I relaxed on to the sunbed and contemplated the last year. It had been a busy and profitable one. I’d fulfilled a lot of contracts and a hoped for holiday was the reward I knew I deserved. I closed my eyes and cleared my mind of any conflict.
    I must have fallen asleep for, when I woke up, there was noise all around me. I checked my watch. It was late. The beach must have filled up while I’d been sleeping. A sudden movement from to the right of me made me sit up. Someone was stretched out on the other sunbed.
    I sighed. Was there no solitude to be had?
    I looked at the slumbering figure. Sleek. Svelte. Suasive. I shook myself. I couldn’t contemplate complications. I needed a clear head. For the year ahead. I might have weakened if, some five minutes later, the figure hadn’t raised itself from the sunbed, slipped into something floaty and disappeared into what was now the throng of figures filling the beach. I closed my eyes again, wondering if the girl realised what a lucky escape she’d had.
    I must have dozed off again. A noise woke me. It wasn’t voices. It was the scratching of wood on quartz grains. Someone was dragging something along the beach. I’ve dragged enough things to know. It was my sunbed. The spare sunbed the girl had been sleeping on. I raised my body only to come eye to eye with the woman from across the pool. Her gaze cut me to shreds then, undaunted, she proceeded to drag the bed to where her companion was. Seeing there were already two sunbeds under the umbrella. I wondered who my sunbed was for. I couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to join her. She started to drag the spare sunbed from beside her partner and dump it further along the beach. She then positioned mine next to her husband’s, if husband he was. I waited for her to bring me the presumably sub-standard sunbed that she had discarded.
    I presumed too much. She sank down on to my sunbed like a sun that had finally set.
    Suffering from too much exposure, both from the sun and the sunbed isolation, I retreated to the hotel. It was late afternoon when I opened the back gate to the hotel which led directly to the poolside. There were two gaps in towel land. I quickened my pace lest some other sunbathing sod would beat me to the two unoccupied, spacially apart, sunbeds facing the final rays of the late afternoon sun. I sank down gratefully and closed my eyes. I don’t know how long passed but, suddenly, there was a screaming in my ear.
    “That’s my sunbed!”
    I opened my eyes and sat up. Mrs. Sunbed Stealer was standing directly in front of me, blocking my sun. Her husband stood meekly behind her.
    “There was no towel on it!” I said.
    “I don’t care if there was no towel on it! This is my sunbed. I always sit on this one. I’ve sat on it all week!”
    “Well, you’ll have to go and sit on some other one,” I said.
    She turned to her husband.
    “Are you going to let him speak to me like that?”
    Her husband said nothing.
    She rented her anger at his apathy on me.
    “You’ll have to get off!” she said.
    “I have no intention of getting off this sunbed,” I said, silkily.
    I never lose my temper. You can’t afford to in my job.
    “This is my sunbed,” I added.
    “We’ll see about that,” she said.
    Idle threats, I thought. I’d heard them before.
    She bent down, slipped her hand under the end of my sunbed and lifted it up with all the force she could find.
    For the second time that week, I found myself with my bottom in the air and my head in a flowerbed.
    Her laugh was hyena-like as she pulled the upturned sunbed forward and upright, manoeuvring it with unsuspected muscles, deposited her towel on it and, along with her husband, high-tailed it into the hotel.
    Why are people so cruel? What is their problem? Don’t they know cruelty breeds cruelty? I’d learnt that at an early age and carried on with it in my career, using my clumsiness constructively.
    I learnt one thing from the flowerbeds. They make good hiding places. Especially in the shrubs at the rear.
    It was very late in the evening when I positioned myself there. The woman and her husband were in the bar adjoining the pool. Consuming an eye-watering amount of alcohol. I knew what would happen. Her kind were all the same.
    “Let’s go up to our room,” I heard her husband say.
    “I’m tired. I’m going to lie down on my sunbed,” she said.
    “You’re not allowed to at night,” said her husband.
    “Who says so? It’s my bed. Besides which, I have to get my towel.”
    “Leave it there. It’ll save us coming down so early in the morning,” said her husband. “Let’s go up.”
    She should have listened to him. But I knew she wouldn’t.
    “Go up yourself!” she said. “You’re never there for anyone anyway,” she slurred to her husband’s disappearing back.
    She staggered over to the sunbed and sank on to it. Seconds later, she realised something.
    “Where the bloody hell’s my towel?”
    “Here it is,” I said crawling forward and placing the folded up towel it over her nose and mouth.
    She didn’t have time to scream. Or laugh. I always have that. The last one.
    “This is my bed!” I said.
    I don’t know whether she thought I was referring to the sunbed or the flowerbed. I’m not sure even I knew.
    “But now you’ve made it yours, you can lie in it,” I said softly.
    She soon stopped struggling and lay quiet.
    That’s all I had ever wanted. All my life. To get away from the cruel laughter. At my clumsiness. And the work that had come with it. The work that had kept me busy. But I guess there is no escape from work for me. The only difference this time is I won’t get paid.
    People should be nicer to each other. After all, you never know who you’re speaking to. That woman might have changed her attitude. If she’d known.
    Even hitmen have holidays.

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